Word: proctore
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...fears of the people. The political overtones of the play were obvious (which is probably why Hollywood has never attempted to make a movie of it), but the play was more than a mere social pamphlet. It centered on the moral struggle of its farmer-hero John Proctor, who, accused of "consorting with the Devil," chooses to die rather than confess to a crime he has not committed...
...adapted for the movies by Jean-Paul Sartre, the Salem witch trials emerge as a plot by the aristocracy to chastize and control the stiff-necked rabble of the town. Thus, in the movie version, Proctor chooses to die for a cause rather than to preserve his own integrity. This distortion, coupled with an over-simplification of the motives of each character, considerably lessens the dramatic power of Miller's play...
Sartre has further chosen to emphasize the revengeful desires of Abigail Williams, a seventeen-year-old vixen who, after being seduced by Proctor, plots to have his wife hanged as a witch in order to take her place as mistress of the Proctor farm. Naturally then, there are some typically Gallic seduction scenes that are only implied in the play. The blatant lust of Abigail, brilliantly and demonically played by Mylene Demongeot, completely erases the more insidious evil of the original character...
...trial, Captain Proctor, a police ballistics expert, would go no farther than to say of the death bullet: "My opinion is that it is consistent with being fired by that (Sacco's) pistol." In a subsequent affidavit, Proctor stated: "At no time was I able to find any evidence whatever which tended to convince me that the particular model bullet found in Berardelli's body, which came from a Colt Automatic pistol, which I think was numbered 3 and had some other exhibit number, came from Sacco's pistol, and I so informed the District Attorney and his assistant before...
Edmund M. Morgan, Professor of Evidence at the Harvard Law School, summed up the testimony given by the two police ballistics experts concerning Sacco's pistol as follows: "Had Captain Proctor and Van Amburgh constituted the jury with the data then in their possession and with the state of mind disclosed in the record, they must have returned a verdict for the defendants upon this issue...